but it was great to sit down and be doing it - it's funny how sometimes you're stuck, so you put it aside and do something else, then with your mind still sort of vaguely aware there was a problem you had or you weren't sure what else to do, it becomes very clear, precisely when you're not really paying attention to it.
anyway what has been satisfying is that i came across a few problems, and i figured out how to solve them, but i didn't resort to google or asking friends for advice, i just said "i want to be able to do this" and found a way. end result isn't efficient or "professional" but it works and it doesn't crash and it's doing more than i had originally wanted/intended (in a good way).
this is all for the lisa kellner / kazue taguchi collaboration (which i'll post more about another time) - the virtual component. first step was drawing some shapes with curves:
i wanted to have these revealing some video i shot of lisa's installation:
problem was, a bit more of the video than just the shape was showing up - actually a really cool effect (which i would probably have trouble creating if i were trying to make it happen intentionally, but it wasn't what i wanted and in fact was, in this instance, specifically not what i wanted). here's a still:
and a video (looked cooler in motion):
turned out that wasn't programming-related, i just wasn't importing the shapes from illustrator into flash correctly. relief.
the next day or the next next day or maybe the day after that, i had it pretty much doing everything i wanted it to do, here's a short video clip:
but after a minute or so, i would get a scary error message:
every time something doesn't work, i get a bit nervous, i imagine i won't be able to fix it, or maybe nobody can it's just not fixable. and sometimes that's the case, which means - oh man - i have to do something else. but more often than not, it's just a matter of paying attention and trying to figure out what's going wrong. so i looked through my inefficient code and i found a few things which looked like they could cause problems, and i changed them, and now i'm all set, ready for the physical installation on thursday at the brooklyn arts council gallery. there are still a few things i want to play with (for example, i want to add more shapes, based on the stills kazue and i took last week). but i'm happy with what exists right now and it works, no errors, doing exactly what it is supposed to do. here's a screen-capture still:
looking forward to sharing it properly on thursday.
